The neo-Confederate movement isn't known for its racial diversity, but there long has been one dedicated black man willing to fight for the Southern cause: H.K. Edgerton. A constant fixture at protests in support of Confederate symbols, Edgerton at one point walked from his home in Asheville, N.C., to Austin, Texas, dressed all the while in Confederate gray and toting a battle flag.

In March, after being accused by white neo-Confederate colleagues of financial improprieties, Edgerton quit the fight and furled his flag.

Edgerton served for years as the lone member of the board of advisers of the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC), a position without pay or authority. In that role, Edgerton provided a thin defense against the charges of white supremacy that are regularly levied against SLRC Chief Trial Counsel Kirk Lyons, who was married at the Idaho compound of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and has long had close ties to major racist figures.

Rowland Evans was Mr. Novak's partner in their successful column for 30 years. They complemented each other, Evans the patrician Democrat and Mr. Novak the rougher-edged Republican. But Mr. Novak says Evans, who died in March 2001, misled him about the depth of his friendship with frequent column subject Robert F. Kennedy, and the frequency of their contacts. Mr. Novak found out while researching his book, and from Evans's own mouth: the oral histories he left behind. Mr. Novak speaks of Evans in the book with a correct, careful and unmistakably cool affection.

Children must be taught landmark dates in chronological order from primary school, to give them a common sense of British history and identity, Ofsted tells the Government today.

Far from knowing the order of key events, such as the Battle of Hastings or the signing of Magna Carta, pupils have no overview of history and cannot answer the “big questions” it poses, the schools’ inspectorate has found.

Not only are key events in British and world history overlooked, but without a sense of the order in which they occurred, students cannot make any connections with the periods that they have studied.

The Kalashnikov, the world's most abundant firearm and a martial symbol with a multiplicity of meanings, turns 60 this year. In some places this is cause to shudder. In Russia it is treated as a milestone to celebrate, and a chance to cry foul.

Once strictly communist products, the AK-47 and its offspring are killing tools so durable and easy to use that they were heralded as achievements of state socialism and industrial might. Uncoupled from the laws of supply and demand by their origins in planned economies, they flowed from arms plants in the tens of millions, becoming national defense and foreign policy instruments for the Soviet Union and allied states.

But the 60th birthday party has displayed the rifle's evolving place in both the market and the Kremlin's mind. These days the Kalashnikov is seen through capitalist lenses, and argued about in ways that could not possibly have been envisioned by its communist creators.

What should we call what happened during those six chaotic days in July 1967 when 43 people died amid gunfire, looting, with whole sections of Detroit in flames?

Many call it a "riot," a term that conjures images of mobs acting spontaneously. Blacks who lived through it call it a "rebellion."
"When I hear the word 'riot' I just get the chills," said Brenda Dixon, 45, of Detroit. "The word 'riot' just seems inhumane, like people acting savagely."

The terms are cognitive shorthand, framing the issues connected with a pivotal time in Detroit's history -- an event that fueled the continuation of white flight and corporate disinvestment, and helped create the most segregated region in the nation....

Thomas Sugrue, a Detroit native and author, said people gloss over the conditions of the time.

"There is a common myth among whites that Detroit was a great city but then the riots happened," said Sugrue, who teaches history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and wrote the acclaimed"Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit."

He said Detroit was a great city for whites but not for blacks who were barred from federal mortgage programs, barred from buying homes in white neighborhoods and toiled in menial jobs as whites got promoted.

Mass graves believed to hold the remains of 2,300 Japanese soldiers killed on the Aleutian island of Attu during World War II have been confirmed.

Maj. Chris Johnson of the Department of Defense says last week's four-day expedition to the Alaskan atoll by U.S. and Japanese delegations turned up clothing and remains that confirmed the burial sites listed in a 1953 report, KTUU-TV in Anchorage, Alaska, reported Tuesday.

Archaeologists uncovered a city gate from the 15th century in the centre of Eindhoven on Thursday. The so-called Woensel gate was one of the three guarded entrances to the centre. City archaeologist Nico Arts says the gate stood at the middle of a wooden bridge that crossed over a 30-metre wide city moat.

Ancient Native American artifacts likely are buried under the path of the proposed South Mountain Freeway, Phoenix's lead archaeologist and freeway planners agree.

But unlike the now-U.S. 60 built in the early 1970s, construction crews won't be allowed to encase the ruins in asphalt. "That's an old saw," said Todd Bostwick, who has studied the Hohokam people for more than 25 years. "They (crews) have to dig them now."

Gardai [Ireland's national police service] have arrested seven people who were protesting against the contentious M3 motorway being routed close to the historic Hill of Tara in Meath.

Five people were arrested this morning and were due to appear in court in Navan on a charge of obstructing traffic, a spokesman for the protesters said.

Two more people were arrested this afternoon and brought to Navan Garda station.

BROOKHAVEN, NY, USA -- In his little office at Stony Brook University east of New York City, the former director of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad has hung a maxim of Martin Luther King: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that."

For seven months, Donny George and his family have tried to rebuild their life in the United States. Even as the radio plays American country music, their thoughts are always on Iraq.

George and his family, Iraqi Christians, are among the scant 133 Iraqis who were allowed to relocate to the United States since the beginning of 2007, according to government figures.

George, 56 and an expert in Mesopotamian archaeology, said that the country needs to take in more.

"I believe 100 percent that the United States should help the Iraqis that are outside and the ones inside who have left their homes. Specifically the Christians," he said. "Both Sunnis and Shiites are now attacking the Christians ... They are going from door to door, ordering them to convert or pay a tax or leave or be killed."

A letter handwritten by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to Gen. Robert E. Lee on April 10, 1865, discussing terms of surrender of the Confederate Army and originally penned at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, will be sold the weekend of August 4-5 by Gallery 63. The letter was consigned by a Texas woman and was authenticated by the late Civil War historian Shelby Foote.

“This may very well be the most important document to come on the market in the last fifty years,” said Paul Brown of Gallery 63. “It truly belongs in the National Archives. It was, in effect, the document that saved our great land. It is not in Washington, it is not in New York. Amazingly, it is at Gallery 63 and will be sold to the highest bidder.” Brown estimated the letter could bring $500,000.

To the Editor:

Re “National Archives Release 11 Hours of Nixon Tapes” (news article, July 12):

Richard M. Nixon’s tape-recorded description of me, in a 1972 conversation with Charles Colson, as “house Jew” for Nixon’s second term was a characteristic piece of cynical Nixonian shorthand.

From the beginning of my service in the Nixon administration in 1969 I was a partisan of Jewish issues, particularly those involving the security of Israel.

As such, I was able to make a substantial contribution to administration policies during the controversies over the Rogers plan and arms deliveries to Israel in 1969 and in the critical days of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Of those polices, Israel’s prime minister during the war, Golda Meir, later wrote in her autobiography that Israel “never had a better friend” in the White House than Nixon.

Notwithstanding the miserable tapes, I believe that I can claim part of the credit for Mrs. Meir’s assessment.

Leonard Garment
New York, July 13, 2007

The writer was special assistant and counsel to President Nixon.

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The Royal Canadian Mint's design for a new $20 silver coin -- which went on sale yesterday for collectors around the world -- has inadvertently evoked one of the darkest moments in the history of polar exploration and raised concerns with the country's main Inuit organization....

One side of the coin carries the current portrait of Queen Elizabeth. The other depicts 16th-century English explorer Martin Frobisher and a compass rose from his era, along with images of the ship he sailed in search of the fabled Northwest Passage and an Inuit man paddling his kayak in ice-choked waters....

A mint spokesman said the kayaker is simply meant to represent the indigenous people of the North, and their role in Arctic exploration. But the combination of elements recalls an infamous episode from Frobisher's 1576 voyage to Baffin Island and the tragic fate of an unnamed Inuit paddler who was lured aboard the explorer's ship, the Gabriel, and kidnapped for transport back to England as token proof of the expedition's success in reaching the New World.

Tony Blair arrived in Lisbon last night to begin a second career in which he must know that success may prove even more difficult than being the first British Labour prime minister to win three elections in a row.

Mr Blair will be anointed as Middle East envoy by the international Quartet, the EU, UN, Russia and the US, knowing the history of the region is littered by the failures of his predecessors as international peacemakers.

On the one hand Mr Blair brings considerable assets to the job, including success in Northern Ireland, and a real interest in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which has no doubt been sharpened by, but did not begin with, the desire to make good for the fiasco of Iraq.

On the other hand, it is hard at present to see how he can succeed without coming at some point into collision with both Israel, where he is justly regarded as a friend, and his chief sponsor President Bush.

The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, still reeling from an assault by Royal Air Force veterans who object to its depiction of their role in the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, has quietly been enduring a barrage from another quarter.

Ever since the museum opened two years ago, the National Association of Japanese Canadians has pressed it to change the way it depicts their community's suffering - and their volunteering, despite that suffering, for active combat.

Frank Moritsugu, now 84, is among those leading the charge. The retired journalist says that the war museum's version of what happened to his family and others - confiscation of property and internment in isolated labour camps - is disturbing because "the emphasis is weird."

The museum dates anti-Japanese sentiment in Canada from Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor; in fact, he says, Japanese Canadians were ostracized for decades, because they worked for lower pay (not by choice) and therefore took jobs from white folk.

"That's the kind of crap that was going on," Moritsugu says. "It was racist and economic."

But more important to Moritsugu and the NAJC lobbyists is what the museum does not say: that 150 or so Japanese Canadians volunteered to don uniforms and fight for Canada.

The bicameral Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) is scheduled to hold a landmark hearing today regarding the hundreds of thousands of Jews forced to flee their communities in the Arab Muslim nations as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Oriental Jews suffered profound violations of their basic human rights under the Islamic regimes throughout North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf Region. This persecution—including pogroms and expropriations—caused their subsequent flight despite longtime residences in these countries. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus, under the auspices of its Chairman, Congressman Tom Lantos, will hear testimony from legal experts on the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries as well as from “living witnesses'”—Oriental Jews who will testify as to their plight in, and flight from, the Arab countries where they were born.

The University of Colorado Board of Regents will hold a special meeting July 24 to consider a proposal to fire Ward Churchill, the controversial ethnic studies professor who has been found by faculty committees and the president of the university system to have committed research misconduct. On Wednesday, several Web sites that have backed Churchill posted announcements of the meeting that reiterated Churchill’s view that he is being punished for his political views, and that called for students and others to protest at the meeting. A university spokeswoman confirmed late Wednesday that the meeting had been scheduled for July 24. She said that Churchill, the university’s lawyer, and a faculty committee would each meet privately with the board, which will deliberate in private, but vote in public on the proposal to fire Churchill, who has tenure. If the board votes to fire Churchill, he has vowed to sue to keep his job.

A Timeline of the Peace Process.

An analysis of thousands of skulls shows modern humans originated from a single point in Africa and finally lays to rest the idea of multiple origins, British scientists said on Wednesday.

Most researchers agree that mankind spread out of Africa starting about 50,000 years ago, quickly establishing Stone Age cultures throughout Europe, Asia and Australia.

But a minority have argued, using skull data, that divergent populations evolved independently in different areas.

The genetic evidence has always strongly supported the single origin theory, and now results from a study of more than 6,000 skulls held around the world in academic collections supports this case.

Next to a mass grave in Malaga, Spain, Juliana Sanchez watches an archeologist scrape dirt from a broken skull and wonders if this might be her father.

``I can't leave,'' she says of the site, where investigators found the remains of children and babies among 220 bodies crammed into a pit by fascist dictator Francisco Franco's death squads. ``I'm too anxious to know if some paper, some trace could be found to show that one of them is my father.''

Sanchez, 76, visits the grave almost every day. Her vigil may be cut short when funding for the dig runs out next month. The future of such excavation projects is one of the most heated issues in the run-up to Spain's general elections next March.

Does Congress have the constitutional authority to legislate limits on the conduct of the war in Iraq?

The answer may seem obvious. But to resolve any lingering doubt, the Congressional Research Service gave the topic a thorough analytic treatment in a newly updated report and concluded that Congress does have such authority.

"It has been suggested that the President's role as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces provides sufficient authority for his deployment of troops, and any efforts on the part of Congress to intervene could represent an unconstitutional violation of separation-of-powers principles."

"While even proponents of strong executive prerogative in matters of war appear to concede that it is within Congress's authority to cut off funding entirely for a military operation, it has been suggested that spending measures that restrict but do not end financial support for the war in Iraq would amount to an 'unconstitutional condition'."

To rebut any such suggestion, the newly updated CRS report"provides historical examples of measures that restrict the use of particular personnel, and concludes with a brief analysis of arguments that might be brought to bear on the question of Congress's authority to limit the availability of troops to serve in Iraq."

"Although not beyond debate, such a restriction appears to be within Congress's authority to allocate resources for military operations," the report stated.

On June 25, 1960, after four years as trusted employees of America's largest spy agency, [William Hamilton] Martin, then 29, and [Bernon] Mitchell, then 31, flew out of Washington, D.C., with one-way tickets to Mexico City. From there, they quietly slipped off to Havana and took a Russian freighter to the Soviet Union, following a plan that had evolved over a year. The case stunned politicians and intelligence officials alike. Looking back, some of the defectors' neighbors and co-workers told investigators that if they'd been more vigilant about the pair's sexual proclivities, maybe they'd have been more suspicious of their patriotism....

But according to the NSA's own investigative files, obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly, there's one major problem with the flaming traitor theory: Martin and Mitchell weren't gay. The formerly classified Pentagon and NSA documents, which reveal previously unpublished details of the historic spy-agency saga, appear to clear Martin and Mitchell of the sexual charges that rocked the country 47 years ago this summer and led to landmark NSA policy changes.

"Beyond any doubt," the unnamed author of a then-secret NSA study on the defection wrote in 1963, according to the recently released documents, "no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency's security program." Screening methods used today at NSA, with a work force estimated at 30,000, evolved from Internal Security Act legislation passed in the wake of the pair's defection.

After interviewing more than 450 individuals about the twosome's character, habits, and sex lives—right down to the skin rash on Martin's stomach—the NSA, in a 1961 report, could find no conclusive evidence the two men were gay. "Martin and Mitchell were known to be close friends and somewhat anti-social, but no one had any knowledge of a homosexual relationship between them," investigators reported. Both, in fact, had American girlfriends, and Martin married a Russian woman four months after his arrival there. Mitchell also wed later.

''My only adversity is age," Senate President Pro Tem Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the longest-serving senator in American history, told his junior colleagues last month. Then he cast the 18,000th vote of his 48-year career in that august body, triumphantly passing the previous record set by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., another legend in his own time. The 89-year-old Byrd observed this historic event with an eloquent, moving but largely overlooked speech on the Senate floor publicly confronting what he described as the "shocking discovery" that he is growing older.

His brain, by all accounts, works just fine. But his hands flutter with an uncontrollable benign tremor and he needs two canes and the assistance of a rotating cast of aides to get around. Making no apologies, Byrd noted cryptically "I am not aware of any requirement for physical dexterity" in order to hold his office. Neither are the voters of West Virginia, who overwhelmingly and uncomplainingly re-elected him to yet another term last year.

ven in colonial days, chicanery and corruption were endemic among American politicians. It's become part of the American electoral tradition.

Can it ever be fixed? Barack Obama has been a champion of improving government ethics at both the state and federal level, but he faces a long history of improbity among our elected officials.

Benjamin Fletcher, governor of New York from 1692 to 1698, took protection money from pirates, stole from the public funds and cheated on customs duties. "To recount all his arts of squeezing money both out of the public and private purses would make a volume instead of a letter," wrote one of Fletcher's critics.

According to the Reader's Companion to American History, "systematic smuggling, graft, extortion and bribery in the colonies cost the British Treasury 700,000 pounds a year. Attempts were made from time to time to clean things up, but defiant juries and mercenary judges -- one of whom remarked 'that in his opinion the Nicetyes of the law ought not to be observed' -- invariably got in the way."

US companies take their corporate history far more seriously than most of their UK counterparts, according to a study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

American companies are more likely to draw attention to official published histories on their websites, more likely to invest in historically-orientated visitor attractions or museums, such as The World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, and more likely to publish official histories.

By taking a more low-key approach to their corporate past, UK companies may be failing to capitalise on a range of potential business benefits, argues researcher Professor Michael Rowlinson of Queen Mary College, University of London.

“Clearly visitor attractions can be businesses in their own right,” said Prof Rowlinson.

“But more importantly, many customers put some store by the fact that a company has a long and recognisable history,” he added.

Marshal Lin Biao, who was handpicked by Chairman Mao Zedong to succeed him as China's leader but who died a traitor, has been resurrected as an army hero in a new exhibition in Beijing's Military Museum.

Lin's portrait is included among the 10 marshals who are honored as the founders of the Chinese armed forces in an exhibition celebrating the 80th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army on August 1.

Lin, denounced for his "treacherous" plot to overthrow Mao, is shown with his nine peers in a display rarely seen since his death in September 1971.

"With objective thinking, we decided to put the picture of Lin Biao along with the other nine marshals," said Jiang Tingyu, senior researcher at the Chinese Military Museum. "We have to show history as it was."

A settlement dating back to the time of the pyramid builders was discovered in Egypt's western desert, the first find of its kind there, Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities (SCA) said Monday.

"A joint Egypt-Czech archaeological mission found a city dating to the Old Kingdom [2687 to 2191 BC] in the Garat Al Abyad region in Bahariya," SCA chief Zahi Hawass said, referring to an isolated oasis 400 kilometres (250 miles) southwest of Cairo...

The latest find is "an important discovery for Bahariya as it is the first time a site dating to the Old Kingdom has been discovered in this region where up till now there have only been Stone Age remnants or Middle Kingdom ruins," Hawass said.

"This period is a missing link in the history of this region," he added...

AN HISTORIC Irish dolmen has been wrapped in tin foil and silver plastic - so that it now looks more like a Flash Gordon spaceship than a prehistoric monument.

Labby Rock, near Castlebaldwin, Co Sligo, and overlooking Lough Arrow, looked more like a "baked potato" according to one expert who visited it recently.

The famous 70-ton dolmen was said to have been used as a bed by Diarmaid and Grainne when fleeing Fionn MacCumhaill.

But Mary Quinlan, who has been visiting ancient monuments for 20 years, had never seen anything like it.

"We came out of the wood and the first thing I saw was the Labby Rock covered in what looked like tin foil/silver paper. I was upset to see this 5,000-year-old monument looking a bit ridiculous.

Broken spear tips and flakes of raw materials unearthed near Prince George are believed to be the remnants of a stone-tool manufacturing camp dating back more than 400 years.

Students at the University of Northern B.C. have discovered more than 200 artifacts at a protected archeological site at Beaverley, about 30 km west of Prince George.

The group, which has been digging for the past month, will now try to figure out who was making the tools, and when.